I grieve the death of this brave woman, who died in what looks like an engineered automobile accident. She was going down the ISIS-Turkey rabbit hole when she departed this world. It wasn't that long ago, that there was an argument that Turkey should not join the EU. Now we see Turkey as the gateway for ISIS recruits going to Syria, and at the same time the gateway for mass migrations aimed at destabilizing the EU. Yet after all this, the author of the video has to allege that this reporter was killed by a "Western Ally". Anyone want to reconsider the alliance with Turkey in the West?

A senior U.S. intelligence officer said Belmokhtar was never a formal agent of the DRS but that he worked in a position similar to a confidential informant for a big city police force. “His cooperation with DRS had to do with the particular politics of the Islamist insurgency during its early stages and ceased once their interests no longer aligned,” this officer said.

A European intelligence officer, who declined to be named, says the politics of the region has at times been highly complex with “temporary marriages of convenience” and shifting divisions and alliances forming around trafficking deals that cross over ideological lines. “There’s a lot of money to be made from smuggling and elements in the intelligence services in the region have also had their fingers in the pie.”

Flashback

This Date In Real History: In Memoriam - Libyan Airlines Flight 114Today, February 21st, 2012, marks the 39th anniversary of the Israeli shooting down of Libyan Airlines flight 114 over the Sinai peninsula. That shootdown by Israeli Phantom 4 fighters cost the lives of some 106 out of 113 innocent passengers, and to this day there has never been a formal explanation by the Israeli government for their reasoning for blasting an unarmed passenger airliner out of the sky.